Filologija, No. 34, 2000.
Original scientific paper
THE BILINGUAL PHOENICIAN-ETRUSCAN TEXT OF THE GOLDEN PLATES OF PYRGI
Paolo Agostini
; Padova
Adolfo Zavaroni
; Reggio Emilia
Abstract
In 1964, the archaeologists excavating the ancient Etruscan city of Pyrgi brought to light three golden plates.Two of the plates were written in Etruscan, while the third one had a Phoenician inscription on it. The archaeologists suspected immediately that the longer Etruscan inscription and the Phoenician text might be related. Yet, scholars' hopes that the promising text of the Etruscan plate might have been an Etruscan kind of "Rosetta stone" were dashed to the ground. They realized very soon that the two texts were -at best -a paraphrasis of each other but they contained no literal translation which might have offered a key to Etruscan hermeneutics. Since then, no author was able to offer a reliable interpretation of the Etruscan plate, dealing with the donation made by the Etruscan chieftain or "king" of the important city of Caere, Thefariei Velianas, to the Phoenician goddess Aštart. We therefore decided to re-examine the plates "from scratch". As a first step, we went through extant translations of the Phoenician inscription and we discovered that some of its terms had been misunderstood and/or mistranslated. After preparing a new and more reliable translation of the Phoenician lamina, we used it as a key to compare and translate the doubtful expressions of the Etruscan text. We are now glad to publish our results that represent the first integral and -in our humble opinion -creditable translation of these laminae.
Keywords
Etruscan language; Pyrgi golden plates
Hrčak ID:
165455
URI
Publication date:
18.6.2001.
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